Lucy Citti Ferreira (São Paulo SP 1911 - Paris, França 2008)
Lucy Citti Ferreira was a painter, draftswoman, printmaker and teacher. She spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Italy and France, experiences that significantly shaped her artistic training. She began her studies in 1930 with the French painter André Chapuy, in Le Havre. Between 1932 and 1934, she attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, during which time she also took part in the Salon des Tuileries.
She returned to Brazil in 1934 and, the following year, met the painter Lasar Segall, with whom she began to study and for whom she also posed as a model. In 1935, she received an honorable mention at the Salão Paulista de Belas Artes and took part in the 2nd Salão de Maio. In 1938, she held her first solo exhibitions at the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil, in São Paulo, and at the Associação Brasileira de Imprensa, in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1947, she settled in Paris again, where she joined the group of artists of the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, broadening her presence on the European art circuit. In 1954, she presented a solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (Masp), consolidating her career on the Brazilian art scene.
In 1988, the Museu Lasar Segall organized the exhibition Sombras e Luzes [Shadows and Lights], bringing together works produced by Lucy Citti Ferreira after her return to Europe and highlighting the expressive and sensitive power of her work. Throughout her career, she remained faithful to aesthetic research, with an emphasis on mastery of drawing and the subtlety of light in her compositions.
Critical Commentary
Born in São Paulo, the painter Lucy Citti Ferreira spends her childhood between Genoa and Paris, where she attends the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She returns to Brazil with her family in 1935, when, through the writer and critic Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), she meets the painter Lasar Segall, becoming his student and also the model for a series of portraits. This contact deeply marks her output of the period; her work comes close to Segall's in both form and subject matter, which leads to harsh criticism and little acceptance in the art world of her time. As the critic Geraldo Ferraz (1905-1979) points out, the attentive observer does perceive many affinities between the work of Lucy Citti Ferreira and that of Segall, but also notices that his work shows a refined, highly controlled gradation in the use of color, whereas the painter explores more the vibration obtained from various nuances, uses toning and seeks a different kind of atmosphere in her works.
Lucy Citti Ferreira travels to Europe again in 1947, where she settles. In general, her output of the 1930s and 1940s remains forgotten in Brazil and rarely appears in exhibition catalogues. As the art historian Vera d'Horta notes, in France the painter begins to produce almost abstract landscapes that reveal an introspective character. In 1988, she holds an exhibition in São Paulo with works produced since the 1960s, gathered in two series - Paisagens da Lembrança [Landscapes of Remembrance] and Memória [Memory]. In some landscapes sinuous forms predominate, as in Colina ao Cair da Noite [Hill at Nightfall] (1970s). In works from the Memória series, the compositions gain verticality and the artist explores luminosity and transparency, evoking forests or church interiors.
Critiques
"Lucy certainly has a painter's temperament, as realized in the works she has now arrived at, through the most tenacious and conscious acquisition of a painting technique in which we find drawing as well as composition, appropriate color, a sense of form, meticulous care in choosing the real datum and, rather than research confined to the pictorial plane, a bold and vibrant penetration into the vital essence of the thematically formulated visual object. The prestige of Lasar Segall's painting - the most complete artistic expression to have unfolded in this country this century, despite its European origins - could not fail to influence the formation of Lucy Citti Ferreira's present visual expression. There is no harm in this influence, nor is there any point in denying it or trying to limit it. This influence serves as our starting point for studying Lucy Citti Ferreira's painting, since it brought a change, an alteration of the possibilities the young woman brought with her from her brief experience of the French school."
Geraldo Ferraz
LUCY Citti Ferreira: sombras e luzes. Apresentação de Maurício Segall. Textos de Jacqueline Kiang, Mário Barata e Geraldo Ferraz. São Paulo: Museu Lasar Segall, 1988. (XI Mostra do Ciclo de Exposições Momentos de Pintura Paulista).
"In France, little by little, Lucy moved from interpreting the human figure to interpreting landscape. Masses and delicate lines appear to represent the visible and its rhythms, which, as she emphasized, owe much in her sensibility to the presence of the wind that she captures in some works, just as in the landscape many whites are surfaces of snow remaining on the ground, where the grandeur of silence is intrinsic to nature itself. In recent oils, strong blues may appear, which she handles among the patches of light that so mark her lyrical nature in this landscape phase. These recent oils are already moving, in rhythm and agglutination of forms, toward an almost watercolor-like aesthetic dimension. In several of them, Lucy's sensibility interprets a kind of dissolution of forms, even when they keep a more solid central core."
Mário Barata
LUCY Citti Ferreira: sombras e luzes. Apresentação de Maurício Segall. Textos de Jacqueline Kiang, Mário Barata e Geraldo Ferraz. São Paulo: Museu Lasar Segall, 1988. (XI Mostra do Ciclo de Exposições Momentos de Pintura Paulista).
Solo Exhibitions
1945 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Associação Brasileira de Imprensa
1945 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at IAB/SP
1948 - Paris (France) - Solo, at Galeria Jeanne Bucher
1953 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Masp
1969 - Antwerp (Belgium) - Solo, at Maison de Rubens
1977 - Paris (France) - Solo, at Chapelle St. Bernard de Montparnasse
1979 - Paris (France) - Solo, at Chapelle St. Bernard de Montparnasse
1988 - São Paulo SP - Sombras e Luzes [Shadows and Lights], at Museu Lasar Segall
Group Exhibitions
c. 1931 - Le Havre (France) - Salon du Havre
c. 1933 - Paris (France) - Salon des Tuileries and Grand Palais salon
1935 - São Paulo SP - 2nd São Paulo Fine Arts Salon - honorable mention
1936 - São Paulo SP - 3rd São Paulo Fine Arts Salon
1937 - São Paulo SP - 1st Salão de Maio, at Esplanada Hotel
1938 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Salão de Maio, at Esplanada Hotel
1939 - São Paulo SP - 3rd Salão de Maio, at Esplanada Hotel
1942 - São Paulo SP - 7th Salon of the Visual Artists' Union, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1943 - Rio de Janeiro RJ and São Paulo SP - Exhibition of Brazilian Artists
1944 - Belo Horizonte MG - Modern Art Exhibition, at Edifício Mariana
1944 - London (England) - Modern Brazilian Paintings, at Royal Academy of Arts
1944 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian-North American Modern Painting Exhibition, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1944 - Norwich (United Kingdom) - Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, at Norwich Castle and Museum
1945 - Bath (United Kingdom) - Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, at Victory Art Gallery
1945 - Bristol (United Kingdom) - Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, at Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery
1945 - Edinburgh (United Kingdom) - Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, at National Gallery
1945 - Glasgow (United Kingdom) - Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, at Kelvingrove Art Gallery
1945 - Manchester (United Kingdom) - Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, at Manchester Art Gallery
1945 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Pintura Brasileña Contemporánea [Contemporary Brazilian Painting]
1949 - Paris (France) - Artistas Latino-Americanos [Latin American Artists], at Maison de l'Unesco
1976 - São Paulo SP - The Salons: of the Família Artística Paulista, of May and of the São Paulo Visual Artists Union, at Museu Lasar Segall
2002 - São Paulo SP - Modernism: From the Week of '22 to Sérgio Milliet's Art Section, at CCSP
2004 - São Paulo SP - Women Painters, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2004 - Brasília DF - O Olhar Modernista de JK [JK's Modernist Eye], at Ministério das Relações Exteriores. Palácio do Itamaraty
2006 - São Paulo SP - O Olhar Modernista de JK [JK's Modernist Eye], at MAB-FAAP
2010 - São Paulo SP - 6th SP-Arte, at Fundação Bienal
Source: Itaú Cultural
